The French Revolution

Faith, Desire, and Politics

Noah Shusterman

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429780417
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: European History

Now in its second edition, The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics has been updated to include a discussion about how the actions by soldiers and citizen-soldiers shaped the course of the Revolution, as well as the daily lives and concerns of everyday French people.

Throughout the study, Shusterman highlights the crucial role that religion and sexuality played in determining the shape of the Revolution and examines key themes such as: the impact of the crown's war debts on the fall of the Old Regime, the organization of citizen militias in 1789, and their eventual transformation into France's National Guard. This edition has been revised to include a fresh analysis of classic nineteenth-century accounts of the Revolution, including those by Jules Michelet, Jean Jaurès, and Edgar Quinet. It also explores the lives of the people who lived through the French Revolution and uncovers the messages about gender, sex, religion, and faith which surrounded them, concerns which did not exist outside of the events of the Revolution.

With a brief chronology of the Revolution and a guide to further reading, this book is an invaluable resource for students of the French Revolution, women and gender, and the history of Catholicism.

1 Religious culture, popular culture

Life in Old Regime France

The France that stood on the verge of revolution in the 1780s did not know that it was standing on the verge of revolution. Nor did it know, in the way that we do now, what a revolution entails. Many of France’s inhabitants knew that some things were changing, about which they were concerned or not, happy or not; and there were things that were not changing, about which they were concerned or not, happy or not. By the standards of eighteenth-century Europe France was a large kingdom, and it was not expected that reforms that pleased one group would please others, nor was it expected that traditions that favored one group would enjoy the approval of the rest of society. And make no mistake—countless traditions existed designed to benefit certain parts of the kingdom, traditions that the holders had to defend jealously. Among the most notable at the time was the relative tax exemption for members of the nobility. But while that tax exemption was a prime example of the nature of privilege that the wealthiest members of French society enjoyed, it grew as much out of the fractured nature of French laws and regulations as it did out of the long tradition of social inequality. Different towns had different rights, depending largely on how long they had been part of the kingdom. Different neighborhoods—particularly in Paris—had different regulations concerning who could work at what job and how much they could expect to be paid. Peasants in some regions paid much lower taxes than peasants in other regions. But do not expect the origins or causes of the Revolution to come from the most downtrodden of the peasants, or the most poorly paid of the workers. The most privileged could feel threatened when those privileges were attacked—and, moreover, they tended to have more resources with which to defend them.

What is today known as la France métropolitaine, or mainland France, has for most of the last two centuries enjoyed relatively stable boundaries. Aside from the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which were part of Germany from 1870 until the end of World War I, and the occupation of France during World War II, the roughly hexagonal shape of modern France has become established enough to forget that it was a lengthy process establishing it. Many parts of mainland France had some legacy of independence from the French crown, whether that went back to the seventeenth century, as was the case for some parts of eastern France, or back to the medieval era, as was the case for Provence, Brittany, and other regions. Some parts of France still had governing institutions that predated that region’s incorporation into the kingdom, institutions which coexisted with more recent government bodies. The various boundaries that covered France, from the dioceses of the Catholic Church to the administrative units known as généralités to the traditional provincial borders, rarely coincided. Local political institutions varied both in name and in influence.

Eighteenth-century France was far more than just the hexagon, however. The French crown ruled over a large number of colonies, from North and South America to parts of India to Africa. Its most lucrative colonies were in the Caribbean, where the economy was based on sugar cultivation, and where enslaved Africans made up the majority of the population. Not everyone in the hexagon was happy about the existence of slavery in the colonies, but under the monarchy the debates over ending slavery were little more than discussions between intellectuals; the crown had no desire to end slavery, and the local elites in the colonies had little interest in any such reforms.

Map 1.1 The provinces of Old Regime France. Many of France’s provinces traced their history to a time before they were part of the kingdom of France.

Map 1.2 The dioceses of Old Regime France. Note the many small dioceses in southern France, and the lack of correspondence between these boundaries and the provincial boundaries in Map 1.1.

Paris was France’s largest city, and had been for quite some time. Sitting astride the Seine River, roughly equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean and France’s northwest borders, Paris had a population of roughly 600,000 people in 1789. Paris had been France’s capital and the home of its kings throughout most of French history. During the seventeenth century King Louis XIV moved the royal court to the nearby town of Versailles, to be away from Paris’s crowds and the dangers he felt they posed. Versailles did not replace Paris as France’s center of gravity, however; Paris remained not only France’s largest city, but its most commercially and intellectually dynamic city.

For all of its diversity, France was still a Catholic kingdom, and it is hard to overemphasize the importance of Catholicism not only in shaping the kingdom that entered the Revolution, but also in influencing the shape that Revolution would take. Because of this importance, it is worth explaining something about what “Catholic kingdom” means in this context. It does not mean that there were no non-Catholics in France. There were significant populations of Protestants, particularly Huguenots, who made up as much as 2 percent of the population. The city of Nîmes had a large Huguenot population, although French Protestantism had become largely rural by the eighteenth century. Relations between Protestant communities and their Catholic neighbors were not the deadly rivalries they had been in the sixteenth century, but tensions remained in many areas where the two religions lived in proximity with each other. Legally, Protestantism was forbidden in France (with the exception of Alsace, which had a noteworthy Lutheran population). There had been a fair amount of government repression of Protestantism during the first half of the eighteenth century, but by the second half of the century such policies had lost most of their public support. A 1787 edict gave Huguenots more rights—including a legal right to marry—although it did not grant Huguenots the right to practice their religion publicly.

Paris and Bordeaux also had significant Jewish communities, as did Alsace. None of these communities were particularly large—there were perhaps 40,000 Jews in France in 1789—though, as one historian has recently noted, Jews did exercise a fascination among thinkers beyond their numbers.¹ The Jewish communities in Paris and Bordeaux were relatively wealthy and integrated into the local societies. The Alsatian Jews were mostly rural, spoke Yiddish, and were less integrated with the surrounding population. Though Judaism was tolerated, Jews themselves were prohibited from many trades and from owning land.

The term “Catholic nation” also does not mean that everyone who was not Protestant or Jewish was a believing and practicing Catholic. Many people, while not necessarily declared atheists or unbelievers, were increasingly removed from the beliefs of Catholicism. That does not, however, mean that they had given up all of the customs and practices that had evolved along with Catholicism. Some religious holidays were the occasions for festivities in which all people took part, no matter their beliefs.

For millions of French people, the Catholic Church shaped not only their faith but also their social lives—their “patterns of social interaction,” to use an academic term. Peasants who spent most of their time on their farms were most likely to see neighbors on Sundays and on religious holidays, whether at church in the morning or, for men, later that day at the tavern. While bishops and priests often complained about the proximity of taverns to churches, most parishioners saw no contradiction between morning mass and afternoon libations. It is not a given that the prevalence of Catholicism represented a deep piety. The historian John McManners notes that

there is difficulty in disentangling religion and custom, for this was a social order in which human relationships evolved and secular business was transacted within a religious cadre; often, one can only guess at the relevance of the religious reference in the minds of ordinary people.²

Here, we are up against the limits of the historical craft; practices, such as church attendance, are easier to document than the thoughts going through the heads of those who attended.

The Catholic Church had official control over the religious life of French Catholics, but that control was not always as easy to enforce as the church would have liked. For one thing, there were a number of divisions within French Catholicism. The French church did have a long tradition of autonomy from the pope, a tradition known as Gallicanism. Almost all French Catholics were part of the Gallican Church, although here belonging or not belonging depended on where one lived, not on the nature of one’s beliefs. But it was not always clear what Gallicanism meant in practice. While the pope had only limited authority over French Catholics, there was no one man who played the role of “French pope.”

By the eighteenth century, the leaders of the Gallican Church spent much of their time dealing with internal divisions. Sometimes this was because of the frequent quarrels between the high clergy—the archbishops and bishops of France—and the lower clergy, which included the 60,000 or so parish priests who brought the church into all but the smallest villages. At other times, the divisions revolved around the battles between the Jesuits, a well-established religious order with strong ties to Rome, and the Jansenists, a loosely structured movement that favored a more rigorous, ascetic form of Catholicism. The Jansenist movement had begun in the seventeenth century. Around the turn of the eighteenth century French Jansenism had run afoul of both the king and the pope, both of whom set out to destroy the movement. Neither succeeded: Jansenism survived through the eighteenth century, at least until most of its energy was diverted to more political issues by the 1780s. Jansenism even outlasted the Jesuits in France, who were expelled from the kingdom in the 1760s. The pressure on Jansenists from both Rome and Versailles would shape the movement, though. As hostility to Jansenism became a requirement for anyone the king might appoint as bishop, Jansenism became more hostile to the episcopacy and more supportive of the lower clergy.

In some places, these intra-church quarrels played a major role in the daily life of French Catholics. In Paris, in particular, the repeated battles between a heavily Jansenist population and an archbishop hostile to Jansenism played out for many decades; during the 1740s the archbishop went so far as to refuse last rites to Catholics who could not prove their hostility to Jansenism. These battles would do much to politicize the population of Paris and strengthen its hostility to the church hierarchy. In most of France, however, these debates had little to no effect on religious life. Catholics went to church, as they always had, and as they imagined they always would. Catholic parents baptized their children at the local church, young couples got married there, and that was where people’s funerals took place, before the burial in the adjacent graveyard. The church bells that rang out on these occasions gave sound to the cycle of life, just as those same bells, ringing out on holidays, gave sound to the cycle of the seasons. Springtime holidays celebrating the resurrection of Jesus occurred just as the earth was coming back to life, while fall holidays like All Saints’ Day and the Day of the Dead came when the earth’s fertility was coming to its annual end. These mixtures of meanings—the “agro-liturgical calendar,” as the historian François Lebrun calls it—show just how difficult it is to separate religious life from other aspects of life in early modern France, be they agricultural, economic, or social.³

It is important, therefore, to make a distinction between official Catholicism and the religion that people practiced. Many of the folk traditions that had arisen around various saints did not enjoy the approval of church leaders. Many of the men in the French clergy, whether parish priests in small villages or wealthy bishops, were as concerned about excessive or inappropriate celebrations as they were about those who did not attend mass at all. One priest who had just arrived at his village in southeast France found that the villagers welcomed Lent by having a newlywed bride light fires in front of people’s doors at night, so that the following day all of the horned animals in the village could walk through the ashes.⁴ In this case as in countless others, villagers saw nothing wrong with the practice—this was how they had always practiced their religion, and how they imagined they always would. Priests were often shocked and scandalized, seeing in these traditions not expressions of Christian faith but the remnants of paganism and superstition. There were limits, however, to the extent to which the men in the church could do anything about those traditions. A priest in a village was caught between two allegiances—to the villagers he saw regularly, and to the church hierarchy whom he represented to those villagers. Priests had to choose their battles, and many came to accept the “superstitions” they saw around them.

Then there were those in eighteenth-century French society who saw the whole thing as superstitious—not just the more obscure practices, but Catholicism itself, Christianity itself, even religion itself. The period is commonly referred to as the “age of Enlightenment,” and the chorus of those praising the virtues of rationality and science over faith and tradition grew throughout the eighteenth century. The leaders of this movement, referred to as the philosophes, differed on the specifics of their views. Some saw in religion a source of order, others saw merely a means of blinding the population. But all saw in the Catholic Church itself a despotic institution that kept society from progressing. The battle cry to “écraser l’infame”—“crush that hideous thing”—became the motto of a movement that tried to free eighteenth-century society from the reins of traditional beliefs. The man who coined that battle cry was Voltaire, a philosopher, novelist, playwright, and one of the Enlightenment’s biggest stars. Unlike some more radical philosophers of the Enlightenment, Voltaire was no atheist—and he feared a society where atheism was common. Religion exists, he wrote, “to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness of God by their virtue.”⁵ For philosophes like Voltaire, the value of a religion—as with any other custom or tradition—lay in its utility for society. By that measure, the Catholic Church fell short. Voltaire saw in the Catholic Church a collection of lazy men who abused their power and lived off the work of others.

For all of the Enlightenment’s criticisms of the Catholic Church, it is best seen as an optimistic movement. The philosophes believed that men, by using their reason, could improve the society in which they lived. They also believed that the spread of knowledge would help society advance. Much of that knowledge would be spread through the written word, but there were also institutions that rose up throughout France, as well as elsewhere in Europe, designed to help spread Enlightenment. There were official academies in most French cities, where leading men (and sometimes women) could gather to discuss the ideas of the day. There were also the more informal salons in Paris, where select members of high society would gather. Those salons were often hosted by women, although not everyone appreciated the prominent role that women played there. By the end of the Old Regime a backlash had begun against these women and the influence they wielded, led in part by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss writer and philosopher. For Rousseau, men should be “active and strong.” Women, on the other hand, should be “passive and weak,” and concentrate on their domestic duties, leaving the world of politics to men.⁶

Rousseau was an extremely popular writer during the second half of the eighteenth century, though he fits oddly with the other leaders of the Enlightenment, most of whom focused on the importance of rationality. Rousseau was more sentimental. Surprisingly for modern readers, he was as popular with women as he was with men—if not more so. Though he advocated that women be restricted to domestic roles, he also emphasized how important those domestic roles were in shaping citizens. “A home whose mistress is absent,” he wrote, “is a body without a soul which soon falls into corruption.”⁷ Rousseau’s arguments against sending infants out to wet nurses led many educated women to start breastfeeding their children. Some recent scholars have seen a certain logic to the way that women at the time embraced Rousseau and his philosophy, despite its apparent misogyny. Still, for those writers at the time who advocated increasing women’s rights, Rousseau’s popularity with women posed a problem. Thus the philosophe Condorcet, who in 1787 advocated giving women full rights of citizenship:

I am afraid of antagonizing women if they ever read this piece. For I speak of their rights to equality, and not of their sway over men; they may suspect me of a secret desire to diminish their power. Ever since Rousseau won their approval by declaring that women are destined only to take care of us and to torment us, I cannot hope to gain their support.⁸

Whether the philosophers of the Enlightenment were a cause or just a symptom, many people were moving away from the Catholic Church in the second half of the eighteenth century. Quantitative hi...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and maps
• Brief chronology of the French Revolution
• Introduction
• 1 Religious culture, popular culture: life in Old Regime France
• 2 The liberal Revolution of 1789 (spring 1789–spring 1790)
• 3 The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (summer 1790–spring 1791)
• 4 The king’s flight and the decline of the French monarchy (summer 1791–summer 1792)
• 5 The end of the monarchy and the September Massacres (summer 1792–fall 1792)
• 6 The new French republic and its rivalries (fall 1792–summer 1793)
• 7 The federalist revolt, the Vendée, and the start of the Terror (summer 1793–fall 1793)
• 8 The Reign of Terror (fall 1793–summer 1794)
• 9 After the Terror (fall 1794–1799)
• Guide to further reading
• Index